ABSTRACT
Although the presence of suburbanization is not unusual for industrialized countries, the massive scale of this phenomenon in the United States is quite distinctive among most societies, except for places like Australia and Canada. In Europe, the walls were essentially torn down or overgrown so that these countries also experienced suburbanization, but at a slower pace and with a different, more working-class-oriented mix of population that was housed in multifamily or apartment buildings. But the presence of a yearning for the country among city dwellers or some antiurban bias cannot explain the immense scale of suburbanization that is characteristic of the United States. To an extent, the agent-side view helps to understand aspects of suburbanization, especially the desire of US residents for a home of their own. Rather, suburbanization was generated by the structural-side activities of real estate entrepreneurs and government subsidies responding to and feeding agent-side desires.
